Atjeh women’s wide trousers — Dutch de wijde broek, die gedragen wordt door de vrouw, “the wide trousers worn by the woman” — are, in F. A. Wagner’s Sierkunst in Indonesië (1949), singled out as “een typisch Atjehs kledingstuk” (a typically Atjehnese garment). Wagner mentions the garment in the chapter “Weefsels en weefpatronen” (Weaves and weaving patterns), in the section on Sumatra, where he lists the garments for which the Atjeh silk cloths — the idja’s — are woven. The wide trousers are the only garment in his list that he marks as distinctively Atjehnese, and the only one he marks as women’s wear.
The passage in Wagner
After describing the motifs, colours, and metallic decoration of the idja’s, Wagner turns to their uses: “Deze weefsels worden gebruikt voor het vervaardigen van vele kledingstukken. Slendangs in meerdere soorten, hoofddoeken, lendendoeken enz. Een typisch Atjehs kledingstuk is de wijde broek, die gedragen wordt door de vrouw. Naast deze kostbare, zeer beschaafde weefsels vindt men ook grovere, waarin rood en oranje overheersen.”
The list of garments is, in itself, unremarkable: slendangs (shoulder-cloths) in several kinds, hoofddoeken (head-cloths), lendendoeken (loin-cloths), “enz.” (etc.). These are the standard garments of Indonesian clothing, and they are the garments for which the silk cloths of many regions are woven. What distinguishes the Atjeh list from the lists Wagner might give for other regions is the wide trousers: the wijde broek is the garment that he marks as typisch Atjehs — typically Atjehnese — and it is the garment that he specifies as women’s wear.
The garment and the idja
The wide trousers are woven, like the slendangs and hoofddoeken and lendendoeken, from the idja cloth — the Atjeh silk cloth with gold- and silver-thread decoration. The trousers are thus not a separate garment with a separate cloth, but a particular cut made from the same costly silk that supplies the rest of the Atjeh wardrobe. The “wijde broek” is, in this sense, the garment that displays the idja’s decoration most fully: a wide trouser gives the largest continuous surface of any garment, and the idja’s anchor motifs and rounded geometric borders, worked in gold and silver on a silk ground in purple, red, green, yellow, blue, white, or black, would show to their fullest extent on the wide expanse of a trouser leg.
The pairing of the wide trousers with the coarser red-and-orange cloths — “Naast deze kostbare, zeer beschaafde weefsels vindt men ook grovere, waarin rood en oranje overheersen” — suggests that the wide trousers, like the other garments, came in two registers: the costly idja version for the wealthy, and the coarser red-and-orange version for everyday wear. The garment itself — the wide trouser cut — is the typically Atjehnese element; the cloth from which it is cut can be either the costly silk or the coarser cotton.
The garment in the regional context
Wagner does not give a comparative account of women’s trousers in other regions of the archipelago, but the slendang, the hoofddoek, and the lendendoek are all garments that appear across the archipelago, and the saroeng (tubular skirt) is, in many regions, the standard women’s lower garment. The Atjeh wide trousers are thus, in Wagner’s list, the garment that distinguishes the Atjehnese wardrobe from the wardrobes of other regions: where other regions give women the saroeng, Atjeh gives women the wide trouser. The garment is, in this sense, the sartorial marker of Atjehnese distinctiveness — the piece of clothing that, in Wagner’s account, marks the Atjeh woman as Atjehnese.
Significance
The Atjeh women’s wide trousers are, in Wagner’s account, the typically Atjehnese garment — the single piece of clothing that he marks as typisch Atjehs. Their significance in the larger history of Atjehnese decorative art is that they show the idja — the masterwork of Atjeh weaving — put to a use that is itself distinctively Atjehnese. The wide trousers are the garment on which the idja’s decoration can be displayed to its fullest, and they are the garment that marks the Atjeh woman’s dress as distinct from the dress of other Sumatran or archipelagic women. The pairing of the costly silk idja with the wide trouser cut is, in turn, the pairing of Atjeh’s most refined textile craft with its most distinctive garment form — a pairing that, in Wagner’s list, stands as the sartorial signature of Atjeh.
See Also
- Idja
- Atjeh silk culture
- Atjeh silk yarn import from Singapore and Penang
- Koepiah der Atjehers
- Sierkunst in Indonesië
- Acheh
- 1949
Source
Sierkunst in Indonesië, by F. A. Wagner, Insulinde — Serie Handleidingen voor de Kennis van Indonesië, Vol. VI (Groningen, Batavia: J. B. Wolters’ Uitgevers-Maatschappij N.V., 1949), p. 56.